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The changing (not so much) electorate

The eccentricities of
our new President aside, American national politics and government in 2017 seem
mostly similar to those of the past generation or so. The same policy
challenges face us, most notably environmental sustainability, climate change,
accommodation of diversity in our communities, security, and the fiscal
solvency of government at all levels. All of these raise questions of subsidiarity i.e.
the doctrine that public problems should be addressed at the level of
government that is as close to the people as practicable. There are serious
questions about whether national government involvement in, for example,
transportation funding, leads to better outcomes or worse policies (Marohn).

At the heart of all of these
issues is the one I think the biggest of all: economic opportunity. It is
difficult to sell affordable housing, or immigration, or environmental
regulations, or even sidewalks, if people feel their economic prospects are
fragile, while those below them on the economic ladder are likely to be idle
and dangerous. The 2010s have seen improved economic conditions, including a
record 75 consecutive months of job growth, but an NBC/Wall Street Journal in
October found nearly half of respondents still "worried or uncertain"
about the country's economic future (Source: pollingreport.com; see also Casselman, Porter). On a variety of policies, it's hard to take the long view if
you're worried about the short term. And it's hard to come together on policy
solutions without the social trust that I'm sure would be facilitated by
broader economic opportunity.

Now comes, to this
familiar menu of problems, the 45th President and the 115th Congress. We only
have exit polling data so far, but as far as we can tell from that, the
demographic groups that elected them followed patterns similar to other
elections dating back to the 1980s. It was during the Reagan years that the New
Deal's primarily economic-based party alignment (with a side order of Civil War
nostalgia) became crosscut with cultural issues. Demographic group behavior in
2016 looked a lot like 1988 and all the elections in between.

The widely varying
electoral outcomes of the past thirty years or so reflect differences in turnout
between the party's bases. Increasing polarization in the electorate means
mobilizing the base is as much or more important than appealing to the middle
(Theriault, Abramowitz). Voting turnout is up among strong partisans and down
among independents, and "ideological sorting" means those strong
partisans are also strongly ideological. Moreover, geographical sorting means
voters live in more politically homogeneous neighborhoods and counties
(Bishop); this far more than gerrymandering accounts for the shrinking number
of swing states and districts. (The two presidential candidates in the close
election of 2016 were within five percentage points of each other in only 11
states, albeit that number is up from five in 2012. Trump won six of the 11,
including the big prizes of Florida [29 votes by 1.2 points], Pennsylvania [20
by 0.7] and Michigan [16 by 0.3].)

In the 2016 exit polls
produced by the National Election Pool and reported by The New York Times and Cable News Network (CNN) we see typical patterns of partisan support from categories
of sex, race and religion. The Times report includes changes from 2012, and
there are some interesting ones--Asian Americans voted 11 percentage points
higher for Trump than they did for Romney--but they don't come with a ready
explanation and are subject to question given the nature of exit polls.

Socio-economic status is
a different story. For a long time, Republican support has increased with
income level, though the effect is less strong in the post-Reagan era.
Education, meanwhile, has for three decades typically shown a strange pattern,
with Republican support increasing with education level up to bachelor's
degree, then shifting sharply Democratic for those with education beyond a
bachelor's degree. The 2016 exit polls sort of continue these patterns, but the
groups are extremely compressed. The highest income level is only seven
percentage points more Republican than the lowest income level, which is
probably neither statistically nor substantively significant. Education groups
are all similar, except for "postgraduate" which remained decidedly
Democratic. Broken out by race, we see why: Trump won heavily among whites
without a college degree, while the candidates split more highly-educated
whites and Clinton retained the traditional Democratic advantage among
nonwhites regardless of education level.

What's going on here?
Political scientists who've studied public partisanship, like Alan Abramowitz,
note that it is pronounced among the engaged public. "This
group," says Abramowitz, "is made up of citizens who care about
government and politics, pay attention to what political leaders are saying and
doing, and participate actively in the political process" (p. 4).
Engagement has been found to increase with socio-economic status. But maybe
that changed this year? It seems on this superficial examination of exit polls
that lower-status groups have now polarized along partisan-ideological lines,
which worked, at least this year, to Trump's advantage.

This begs a number of
questions which, thanks to this not being a natural science using laboratory
experiments, are impossible to answer with any certainty, but I'll ask them
anyway. What if the 2016 Democratic candidate had been a more ideological
candidate capable of channeling public outrage (think Bernie Sanders)? What if
the 2016 Democratic candidate had been from the mainstream of the party but
without Clinton family baggage (think Joe Biden)? What if the Republican
candidate had been from the mainstream of the party without the weaknesses
exposed in the 2016 field (think a non-92-year-old Bob Dole)? What if the election
was decided by popular vote not the Electoral College?

We move, then, from
fruitless but fascinating speculation back to the issues that started this
post, and which generally fuel this blog's discussion. I am not hopeful. Trump,
despite his blunderbuss of a personality and erratic policy statements, has
apparently not been disruptive enough to break the familiar patterns of
American national politics. The Republican Party has parlayed a marginal
advantage in nationwide vote distribution into unified control of the national
government as well as many states, but has shown less interest in solving these
issues than in denying their existence. Experience in states like Kansas, North
Carolina and Wisconsin show the policies we're likely to get from unified
Republican control are those that payback their constituencies, some
ideological (limit abortions, support Israeli settlement in the occupied
territories) but mostly economic (lower taxes and less regulation for health
and safety).

Even for those who want
to take a principled approach to our most troublesome issues, there is a
notable lack of readily available policy solutions, particularly as there is
neither a pile of money nor the political will to pay for them. (Is it me, or
has every nation policy advocated since the rise of supply-side economics in
1980 been required to be "free" i.e. paid for either by somebody else
[the 1 percent, smokers, Mexico, e.g.] or by magical thinking about future
economic growth? I mean, I love free stuff, too, but these are serious problems
worthy of serious collective thinking!)

Hence the attractiveness
in 2016 of expressive politics. The 2016 election makes sense if voting for
Trump (or Clinton, or Sanders) is seen as a gesture rather than a constructive
choice among alternative policy futures. Trump's odd collection of statements
and policy reversals, which would have done in many an earlier candidate, don't
matter because the election wasn't about policy, or problems, or even empirical
reality. It was about making a statement about who is "us" and who is
"them." In that case, the president-elect's insults and taunts in the
run-up to his inauguration are far more important to his electoral appeal than
his health care policy.

Thursday's New
York Times carried two columns about health care on their Op-Ed page.
One, by Drew Altman of the Kaiser Family Foundation, warned based on focus groups that Trump voters
"will not be happy if they are asked to pay even more for their health
care" as appears highly possible given naming of Rep. Tom Price as his
Health and Human Services secretary. Really? Unhappy enough for health care to
be a voting issue? Directly below Altman's column, and next to the other health
care one, radio news director Robert Leonard approvingly quotes former Republican
Representative J.C. Watts on the cultural differences between the
parties: We become good by being reborn--born again. Democrats believe
that we are born good. that we create God, not that he created us. If we are
our own God, as the Democrats say, then we need to look at something else to blame
when things go wrong--not us. If Leonard's right that that's what
conservatives think about liberals, and if liberals think something
equivalently condescending about conservatives, we're a long way from serious
thought about fixing the health care system or anything else.

Expressive politics can
be fun, I'm sure, but not constructive. Their ongoing prominence shows how far
we are as a country from the level of social trust needed to have conversations
about solving our problems and build stronger communities.

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